Scottish highlands: six of the best family-run places to stay

This month, inns, hotels and castles all over the Scottish Highlands are opening their doors again, many of them after a New Year spruce-up. In spring, the west coast of Scotland is my perfect driving destination, still calm and uncrowded and a lovely place to potter around, for a week or so, taking in at least two ferry crossings and one tailback owing to livestock in the road.

To make sure you come back well rested, pick just one spot that's properly off the beaten track. You definitely don't want a big drive every day – you'll need time for hill walking, seal spotting and whisky tasting – and for sleeping off all the excellent cooking. Try to book for dinner, bed and breakfast, then tuck in to bacon, eggs and Stornoway black pudding each morning and you can laugh in the face of lunch.

Here are six of my favourite places to stay in the southern half of the west Highlands, all of them family-owned, attractive, comfortable and sincerely welcoming. All deserve praise for their cooked breakfasts. Taking the train to Edinburgh and hiring a car can be a good option, depending on how many bags, dogs and children you want to bring, and how much you enjoy the M1 and M6.

1 Glengorm Castle, Isle of Mull, Argyll

As a good castle should, Glengorm reveals itself teasingly as you approach. Although the road from the seaside village Tobermory is pitted and hard going, the welcome couldn't be warmer: the owner, Tom Nelson, greeted me and led the way through the giant hall into the panelled library.

There are five handsome rooms for b & b guests, hung with some serious 20th-century art, decorated in smart toiles and stripes and furnished in shabby-chic style with well-worn overstuffed sofas. In addition to a self-catering flat in the castle, there's a newer flat above the estate's great coffee shop, and six characterful old cottages, all with open fires and pretty interiors. There's a line-up of fine single malts in the library, but no dining, other than the coffee shop and farm shop, so b & b guests drive to one of the five pubs in Tobermory (the best food is at MacGochans or the MacDonald Arms).

Glengorm is remote: a working farm and estate at the furthest tip of a Scottish island, it takes all day to get to, even in good weather. When you look out from the breakfast room, the sea is right there. I could see it from my room, too. At various times of year, on walks around the estate, you might spot white-tailed eagles, seals and basking sharks. During my visit, Tom's 10-year-old daughter spotted a pod of dolphins. All this, and no locks on the doors. Heaven.

From £350 a week for self-catering cottages and flats, or £160 a night for a double room, b&b (01688 302321; glengormcastle.co.uk).

2 Isle of Eriska, Benderloch, Oban, Argyll

Back on the mainland, or nearly, the Isle of Eriska Hotel, Spa and Island, as it is emphatically named, occupies its own 300-acre island, where 50 guests are looked after by 40 staff.

It's smart and comfortable in the country-house style, with houndstooth-check carpet and leather club chairs in the library, and botanical prints in some of the rooms and suites. It's great for families, who can take over one or more of the cottage suites, yet there's a tranquil atmosphere appreciated by older guests.

There's no dress code as such but, as they gently point out, many gentlemen choose to wear a jacket and tie in the dining room.

Eriska is in quite a different league from Glengorm Castle, where guests are welcome interlopers, but essentially a sideshow; here, everything is laid on carefully, from fine dining to spa treatments, sauna, Jacuzzi and gym – and a nine-hole golf course. The location is wonderful: seabirds, herons, seals, otters and roe deer can all be seen, and badgers come to the library door every night to be fed milk and brown bread.

Guests in the spa suites get a hot tub, conservatory and an extra degree of privacy, but I prefer the rooms in the main building – not just because they feel a little more old-school, but because it's a pleasure to saunter down for breakfast, or to read or sip single malt in the library bar.

A district on the western side of Argyll and Bute, north of Mull of Kintyre, Knapdale is heavily wooded (with trees both ancient and modern), and feels more remote than it really is, with few metalled roads but scores of trails and cycle paths in the forests – where you might spot red squirrels, otters and beavers. As you drive south from Crinan Canal, you're treated to one wonderful sea view after another.

David Wilson and Clare Johnson run their small restaurant with rooms with an intuitive sense of what their guests want. Turning up in the dark and being served a perfect Negroni cocktail within minutes convinces me that restaurant work is a vocation, not a job. David looks after the guests while Clare cooks, brilliantly, self-taught and inspired by Simon Hopkinson and Claudia Roden. Look out for beef or lamb from Ormsary Estate, perfect potted crab, and scallops with chorizo or pork belly.

The old stone walls in the dining room are hung with paintings by established local artists, and an open fire and wood-burning stove make it feel as cosy as it looks. The bed linen and robes in the five contemporary-style rooms are well up to par, and I'm charmed by home-made ginger biscuits and a charming "what to do locally" guide.

It's 42 years since the Ryans acquired Crinan Hotel, an ancient drovers' inn in a tiny fishing village, which assumed a more baronial identity during Victorian times. They've kept it looking handsome, yet moved with the times.

Nick Ryan (whose trews, I swear, match the chairs in the bar) and his wife, the artist Frances Macdonald, now see the place as "an art gallery with rooms".

Where there was once a seafood restaurant on the first floor, overlooking the tiny boatyard and lock-keeper's cottage, visitors can now view (and buy) art by Scottish artists from the Royal Glasgow Institute and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. A second gallery is housed in a coffee shop down the road, near the annexe that is due to open this year as a studio for visiting artists.

My room is big, comfortable and very quiet, with a picture-window view over Loch Crinan towards Moine Mhor and Kilmartin Glen, where I'm heading the next day to clamber up the Iron Age fort of Dunadd. This hotel is as full of life as its remarkable owners: look out for the white piano originally shipped in for Dave Brubeck; Nick's collie-cross, Fly, who uses the lift if you'll push the button for him; and, of course, dashing seascapes by Frances. There is a ground-floor restaurant, with loch views, a seafood bar, pub and coffee shop.

Sailors love it here, especially the pub, where you can eat razor clams from Colonsay, and smoked salmon from Rothesay. Dogs are welcome – 11 in situ at once is the record.

At the end of a single-track lochside road in the Trossachs, close to Balquhidder, is the hippest of my Highland half-dozen.

Monachyle Mhor, another working farm, is a family affair, but principally the vision of Tom Lewis, farmer, entrepreneur and food-lover. There are five guest rooms in the pink-painted farmhouse, and nine around the courtyard buildings.

I'm put in Sawmill, one of the more rock 'n' roll rooms with a chaise-longue, a dressmaker's model wearing a paste necklace and a luxuriously minimalist bathroom featuring a huge bath and a walk-in shower/steam room with a slate-topped bench.

Modern canvases add to the property's edgy glamour and the lounge, decorated in tweed, velvet and leather, in mossy, heathery hues, is full of art; the bar feels almost urban, with its teal tongue-and-groove, sweetie-coloured Scandinavian stools and Wild West bric-a-brac. The food, prepared using produce that's nearly all grown, raised or foraged nearby, is top-drawer, and in step with culinary trends, from canapés of spiced popcorn and haggis bonbon to smoked potato with pink fillet of Highland beef.

Monachyle Mhor is, to my mind, one of the best small hotels in the UK: stylish, unique and slightly cheeky. There's another "room" you'll have to book ahead: the Lovestruck is a converted horse truck, rather like a log cabin on wheels, a five-minute walk from the main house, with a view straight down the glen and over Loch Voil.

Less than an hour's drive from Glasgow, the Cross Keys is a whitewashed village pub dating back to 1703, with two atmospheric bars that remain largely unchanged, and a breakfast room where old beams are seeing daylight after years under Artex.

Brian Horsburgh and Debby McGregor took it on five years ago, creating the sort of "Sunday lunch pub" that they liked – a relaxed alternative to country-house weekends.

Young, local staff take time to chat, and the background iTunes playlist is excellent (Jimmy Cliff, Buddy Holly). I'm told the twice-monthly Sunday folk sessions are going down a treat.

Expect to eat good bistro food: fish and chips, sausage and mash or pie, and roasts of local beef. I had excellent chicken livers with a home-made thyme sauce, then grey mullet with crispy skin on mash. It's terrific value: wines by the glass start at £3.95, and you can have Cava or Prosecco, if not Laurent-Perrier NV, and there's local beer on tap.

I'm struck again by what good value it is at breakfast, which comes not only with black pudding, but fruit pudding, too.

The three rooms upstairs, in a newer part of the building, are spruce and contemporary, with puffy white duvets, spotty blinds and strong showers. When you consider the price, they are miraculous, and do very nicely as a base for exploring the Trossachs.

From £70 for a double room, b&b. Dinner costs around £30 for three courses, excluding drinks (01786 870293; kippencrosskeys.com).